Epeen Bot FAQ

Epeen Bot charts all of a character's parses on a timeline and shows them in relation to a large
number of other raiders (specifically, all those who publically log on World of Logs).

Questions you might be able to answer using Epeen Bot:

Where do I really stand in comparison to all other raiders? Am I about average? Better than average?

Am I improving over time compared to everyone else?

What's the performance of my raiders? Is everyone at a similar level or do I have super stars or weak links
in my raid compared to the rest of their class/spec?

What does the distribution of DPS look like for one spec over time? Epeen Bot visualizes this more clearly
than DPS Bot with the various percentiles charted over time.

How often is the data updated?

Every day at around 10AM EST. A script is run on a schedule that pulls down the latest data from
World of Logs at 9AM which then crunches everything for Epeen Bot and DPS Bot - this takes up to an hour so you
might see results a little earlier if you reload a bunch. The data dump from World of Logs contains roughly all
parses from the last 24 hours (technically the data should contain all parses up to about 6AM EST - I leave a couple
hours of time to make sure that the file is ready).

What are the limitations of Epeen Bot? What isn't being shown?

Excellent question! As with everything on Raidbots, there are many considerations to keep in
mind.

Many of the top guilds always log privately and will never be part of the dataset. I believe this has more of
an impact at the beginning of a patch and becomes almost a non-issue after a few weeks.

With heroic bosses, the number of raiders getting kills will be increasing as time goes on. If a player gets
a kill in the first week a boss is out and charts low, the takeaway is that he or she might be at the lower end of
exceptional players. As time goes on, that player will likely rise up and be at a very high percentile.

What is shown for healers and tanks?

For healers, HPS is tracked. This is not a great stat but it's what is measurable. I really
wouldn't recommend jumping to many conclusions for healers based on this data. Healing has a lot more variables
than simply HPS.

For tanks, DPS is tracked. Again, I don't have enough data to be able to track too much else. DPS
doesn't give you any idea about how survivable tanks are but it can give you an idea if a tank is doing as much
damage as they can - this can be important on those first kills. It also might give some indication of threat but I
wouldn't trust it too far in that regard.

Why can't I find data for my character or someone else?

To show up in Epeen Bot, the following must be true:

The character must be part of a public log on World of
Logs. I do NOT have access to private logs. I also don't have access to any other logging sites, only WOL.

Even intelligent and handsome users like yourself sometimes make mistakes - double check that you have the
right spelling for the character name and are looking at the correct realm ♥

Characters that transfer worlds will not have data moved with them. You might have to look at the character
on multiple realms to get the full story.

Worst case scenario is there's a bug/typo in my realm list or character lookups. If you think you've run into
a bug, feel free to email me!

What are the percentiles? How are they calculated?

While you might initially shudder and remember tests in elementary school, percentiles are pretty
useful. Using the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 95th percentile from all parses on World of Logs, Epeen Bot can put
together a pretty decent view of where a player stands in relation to everyone else capable of killing that boss.
The 50th percentile marks the middle ground and is where most players end up clustered. If you're up higher at the
75th or 95th percentile, you can say with some reliability that you parse higher than 75 or 95% of the rest of the
raiding population.

Why are personal percentiles approximate?

Due to the way I'm currently collecting and crunching the data, I calculate the player percentile
when you view the page. At that point, I don't have access to the full data set because it's huge. To get an
approximate percentile, I look at the different between your DPS and the closest 10th percentile around you and
calculate it from there. It's Pretty Close™ and good enough for now. If any of you out there with knowledge
of stats think this isn't good enough, let me know and I'll look into getting a more accurate personal percentile.

Is there enough data to draw reasonable conclusions?

Raidbots tracks tens of thousands of raiders every week - the data source is a summary provided
directly from World of Logs and contains every public parse uploaded to the site. For a given fight in a raid week,
there are often thousands of individual players for each individual class. While it's not perfect and doesn't
contain everything, it's the best data source available right now.

You can always get a view of how many samples are in the data set if you tweak DPS Bot
a bit (that link shows a rough history of how many of each spec have been tracked in heroic fights over the last
6 months). As with everything else on this site, decide for yourself but be smart about the numbers.

I top meters in my guilds - why am I not ranked higher overall?

A lot of factors contribute to individual DPS: duration of boss fight, number of healers, good use
of Bloodlust, boss strategy used, having all raid buffs, external unique buffs (PI, Innervate, etc), skill of the entire raid, and more.
While you might be topping meters in your own raid, your guild might have a slower kill that impacts how effective
Bloodlust is or your raid might use a strategy that minimizes individual DPS. The reality is that your entire raid
might just be lower than other guilds.

I get trusted with kiting/debuff/backup duty - is there any way for Epeen Bot to show that I'm
being useful rather than DPS whoring?

Unfortunately, no. I don't have enough information to be able to determine what a player was
doing during a fight. Feel good in knowing that you're a key part of getting the kill (the most important part of
raiding) and go bitch about the shortcomings of Raidbots on forums.

How does Epeen Bot handle duplicate reports?

Duplicate reports are a pain in the ass and probably impact the reporting in some cases. For the
moment, if one player shows up in two different parses on the same day, Epeen Bot uses the higher DPS of the two.
Duplicate reports happen pretty frequently if more than one person log a raid during a night.

This is all crap, WoW is just a game.

Sure it is but the great thing about MMOs is that different people can play in different ways.
Some people care about the detailed stats and try to min/max everything they can - that's the kind of player I am
and a lot of the hardcore raiders.

How do I prevent my data from showing up on the site?

World of Logs only exports public parses to me. If you don't want data showing up, set your logs
to private and no new data will show up.